Public speaking is a common activity in today's society. Beginning in grade school classrooms, where students are called upon to answer questions or must give reports in front of the class, through careers as lawyers, politicians, teachers, store managers, and many other occupations. At public and private meetings across the globe, people stand before crowds to deliver committee reports, financial reports, or technical presentations, answer questions, announce news, or otherwise report information to a crowd. FIG. 1 illustrates speaker 10 performing a presentation in front of audience members 12, 14, and 16. In FIG. 1, presenter 10 is speaking at a board meeting.
Public speaking is a challenging skill that almost everyone could improve upon, and very few feel totally comfortable performing. Some people fear public speaking to the point of physical distress, nausea, and feelings of panic. A number of methods have been proposed to overcome fear of public speaking, or to improve public speaking skills. Many attempt to rehearse public speaking. Practice can be performed in front of a mirror, or in front of a small group of friends and family. Those methods of practicing offer some benefit, but the feedback received by the presenter is minimal. A mirror offers almost nothing. Friends and family may applaud or give an encouraging comment, but are unlikely to offer serious constructive feedback.
A person can practice a speech while filming the presentation or recording the audio, and then review the recording to determine where improvements could be made. However, without a professional to review the performance, only major issues are likely to be noticed and improved upon. Reviewing a recording takes significant time when only a few specific points of the practice speech contain issues worth noting for improvement. In addition, feedback is not generally instantaneous, or even quick. A person may not review the tapes until a significantly later time. If the person wants a skilled second party to review the tapes, days or weeks could pass before feedback is received.
The challenges with prior art methods for public speaking practice mean that practice is time consuming and of limited value. The result is that a speaker may practice a speech once or twice prior to public speaking, but will not continue with practice to develop and perfect public speaking skills. Any benefit from practicing a speech once or twice is lost because the speaker does not continue the practice to reinforce public speaking skills.
In some work environments, where public speaking is a critical skill for employees, experts are hired to come into the company and train employees on public speaking. The experts are expensive and, once the training is complete, do not stick around to promote retention and reinforcement of skills. Moreover, speaking before an expert is a significantly different experience than speaking before a crowd. An ideal public speaking training solution would simulate the feeling of speaking before a crowd similar to the crowd that a student or employee would be speaking in front of in real life.
Current presentation and public speaking training solutions do not offer simulations and real-time feedback, limiting user engagement. Furthermore, current solutions lack sufficient mechanisms for practice, assessment, and reinforcement resulting in poor training continuity, sub-optimal retention, and loss of skills. Current training solutions produce poor returns on training investment.